More on Compact Flash and the U810

OK, it seems that the ATA LIF connector on Toshiba drives (like the U810 has) are not entirely compatible with ATA ZIF connectors (like some iPods have). No idea why - but it makes a difference when looking for CF-ATA adapters.

The one I had before was ZIF and wouldn't work. I thought it was the CF Fixed/Removable problem but I was wrong. I saw other people with the U1010 - which, for whatever reason, uses a pin-style connector (very like compact flash) for at least some of its drives - have no problems with CF cards with Removable mode.

So, it must be the adapter and I need to find one that is Toshiba LIF rather than iPod ZIF. Another trawl around ebay nets me an alternative mode, the MW-CF18ZIFADP which is orange and only seems to come from Taiwan. I know it has ZIF in the name and says iPOD compatible but in very small letters it also says "compatible with Toshiba". I now have one and it works - with the additional benefit that it has a metal shell that make it exactly the same size as a Tosh drive and thus fits snugly in the U810 without rattling about.

The ZIF/LIF difference is subtle though - both work fine in my ICY-DOCK USB caddy for 1.8" drives, just not with the U810 ribbon cable - go figure!

Now, it's great to hear about all these 64GB and 100GB CF cards but, quite frankly, I'm not seeing any. Looks like the 133x Transcend is the one I can get. It's good for around 20 MB/s read/write which is not bad in comparision with the Tosh drives which are faster at peak but way slower when you get to the inner tracks. There are cheaper Adata and Peak 32Gb cards but these have a write spead of around 3 MB/s and read at 10 MB/s which is pretty glacial. Pretec have announced 266x and faster cards at this size but I've yet to see many for sale. I guess when you can charge 2-3 times as much for the same stuff in SSD format it's pretty obvious where the effort goes.

Non-Portable Computers

May day job is working on Digital Archives and Libraries - when I say non-portable this is what I mean.

..though that's a bit old-hat - now working on the next generation.

Will be scooting over to the USA at the end of November for PASIG so may do a bit of shopping then - depends on whose currency sinks lower though!

U810 and Zaurus

It's been quiet for a while - RS still don't have the PCI-E connectors - they have the 3.9mm high ones but not the 5.9mm ones I require. And I have to buy 5-off which is a tad expensive. If I do go this route I would like to try one of the EEE PC SSD cards in the slot - conics.net have some interesting possibilities but i know enough EEE owners to borrow a stock one for testing.

I am in two minds, however, so I have also bought some surface mount USB connectors from Maplin since the BIOS supports boot-from-USB. Now just need to get some time.

I have a Zaurus (Akita) as well and I've now moved all my stuff off onto the U810 so I can play with it a bit more - I'm currently using Cacko but feel the urge for a full X distro - I curently use pdaxQTrom (thanks Meanie!) but the X->QT hack is a little tardy and my Z doesn't overclock well.

I've not got a CF card working in the U810 yet but haven't really been trying - Toshiba have now released a 120GB 5mm drive which is now tempting me even more - if I can find one! Couple that with a 32GB USB or PCI-E SSD and things start to get interesting.

Elisa revisted

It appears that upgrading Elisa from the Packman packages is a little hit-and-miss. The best thing to do is:

1. Uninstall Elisa and Pigment (use Yast Search and uninstall everything with "elisa" or "pigment" in the name!)
   
2. Erase contents of /usr/lib/python/site-packages/elisa
3. Install the new Elisa (and Elisa-with-plugins) packages which should pull everything else through via dependencies
4. Also a good idea to erase elisa.db and .thumbnails from your .elisa-xxx configuration directory
   

Then wait a while after starting as the media scanner goes off and indexes/thumbnails everything - this makes the old U810 grind a bit.

More U810 thoughts

The U810/U1010 has pads for two Mini PCI-e slots underneath the bottom cover but most only have one in place. Looking at the dissection photos on the Internet it seems that there are no chips or support components missing - just the socket - so it should be feasible to solder a new one in - the pads are easy to reach and the pitch isn't too small.

Getting said socket isn't too easy though - RS Components has them scheduled for October. It looks like the exploding demand for eee PC's and the like has drained the world's supply of Mini PCI-e sonnectors - later eee's also come with only one of two possible sockets in place.

The other alternative, in the same vein as many eee PC mods, is to tack a USB socket in place of the PCI-e connector (using the USB lines that are available on the PCI-e pads). That would be a nice place to put a USB key as an SSD or maybe a TV tuner... Now I just need to find a nice point I can source 5V from - with all the eee PC hacking out there I'm surprised there hasn't been a bit of U810 activity in this area.

I have also got a Compact Flash to 1.8" ZIF convertor (off ebay) to try out using CF as an SSD alternative - slower but actually designed for low power consumption so may well benefit run-time. The first couple of CF cards I tried weren't recognised by the BIOS. To test that it wasn't the convertor I got hold of an Icy Dock USB caddy from Scan - obviously designed for displaced iPod drives! The cards worked fine in this mode - I suspect it is because most CF cards claim to be removable ATA devices and some BIOS's will only accept fixed devices. Transcend is one of the few manufacturers whose CF cards switch to "Fixed" mode when operating in IDE, rather than CF, mode so I'll get hold of one and try it. Sandisk, Kingston and Intuix are brands which do not - from experience. Under Linux you can use hdparm -i on a CF card to find out if it is Fixed or Removable mode.

Elisa 5.3 seems to be an awkward release to get up and running - I had to edit the source code (to bypass a "not implemented yet" error) to even get the main screen up so I'll park that for now until a later release.

Elisa, OpenSuSE fun

Not really U810 specific but there are a few wrinkles to getting elisa working on OpenSuSE 11.0 with the packman packages. The elisa chaps seem to have got the bit between their teeth so this is for 0.5.2 - which may well be superceded and fixed by the time you read this. Anyway, installing the packages with yast results in a non-working situation so the following needs to be done...

• Install IPython - not vital, but helpful for debugging since you can bring up a python shell inside elisa and poke around a bit
• Install python-cssutils since it seems to have dropped out of the dependencies
• You can purge twisted and go back to the yast-installed version since it now seems to be happy with latest version
• Insert a __init__.py file into /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/elisa and /use/lib/python2.5/site-packages/elisa/plugins. This file can be hauled out of the source code in the tar file on the elisa download page.

Once this is done all works OK though it does seem to struggle on the U810 and will lock up some times on heavy activity. In these respects the 0.3.5 release was better - but there is a lot of work under way so we shall see.

Update

No, I haven't gone away - it's just that I'm actually using the U810 for real work rather than messing about with it. It works well enough to be very effective - I now have to stop pressing the Super (Windows to the plebs out there) key when using cursor keys on conventional keyboards.

Lots of things to do...

• Compile the keyboard lights driver
• Elisa 0.5.1 is out
• VMWare server - yes it works OK and the efficient memory page recovery means 1GB is not too onerous
• Patch mesa with the xrandr rotation fix
• Look at coordinate rotation for the mouse - I think this is something xrandr should do too but doesn't seem to